Two weeks in the West

The Bartlett Mountain Fire, a burning in eastern Oregon.
The tiny ranching town of Drewsey was ordered to evacuate, but the
wind shifted, and the town was spared

SEAN ROTHWELL, BLM

This summer, the West is as crispy
as that chicken you left on the grill for too long during the
Fourth of July. Mercury topped the 100-degree mark
everywhere from Boise to Tucson in late June and early July. During
the first week in July, records fell in every Western state except
New Mexico. Although Phoenix is accustomed to sweltering summer
temperatures in the daytime, it was the "coolest" part of the day
that broke the most records: Some nights, the mercury never dipped
below 90 degrees.

Wildfires have flambeed thousands of
acres. Flames swept across a hayfield in northeastern Utah and
killed three men as they worked on a sprinkler; in the central part
of the state, a lightning-sparked blaze scorched more than 300,000
acres in just a few days. The fire periodically closed I-15, and
two motorcyclists were killed when they crashed in a thick cloud of
smoke.

In Idaho, a 35,000-acre fire knocked out
electrical transmission lines and a substation, further straining
already loaded lines. Idaho Power reported record electricity use
in the state, as air conditioners all over the West sucked juice
and strained the power grid. Fire threatened the Kitt Peak National
Observatory and a peak sacred to the Tohono O'odham tribe in
southern Arizona, and a flaming bird, electrocuted by a powerline,
ignited a fire near Aspen, Colo.

Nineteen dead border
crossers were recovered over a three-week period in the Arizona
desert along the Mexico border. Extreme heat contributed to their
deaths.

Closer to the Canadian border, a dip in the river
offered little respite, at least for fish. In Yellowstone National
Park, hundreds of trout died when the water temperature in the
Firehole River climbed above 80 degrees.

Maybe
the V.P. can cool things down. Westerners often bellyache
about their lack of political influence in Washington, but a recent
series by the Washington Post shows that at least one rural
Westerner has too much power: Vice-President
Dick Cheney. Born in Nebraska, he moved to Casper, Wyo., as a
youngster and has called that state home ever since. According to
the Post's expose, Cheney influences his staffers and bullies his
inferiors - including, at times, the president - usually at the
behest of industry.

Cheney's long arm of power has often
reached into public lands in the West. Almost as soon as he arrived
at the White House, he called up Sue Ellen Wooldridge at Interior
(yes, the same Wooldridge who later resigned amid scandal over her
relationship with J. Steven Griles and their shady real estate deal
with an oil industry lobbyist) and enlisted her help in diverting
Klamath River water from salmon to farmers. He was also a driving
force behind making Nevada's Yucca Mountain a repository for
nuclear waste; keeping the cutthroat trout in Yellowstone off the
Endangered Species list; and formulating the rollback of the
Clinton Roadless Plan.

In this case, the stereotype of a
politically powerless West crumbles. But that other stereotype,
that Westerners have a general disregard for the rule of law, holds
up just fine.

One law, however, is like the 11th
Commandment in parts of the West. Revised Statute 2477,
passed in 1866, gave states the right to build roads on federal
lands. Though repealed in 1976, the law still applies to "highways"
that were in use before the repeal. Rural county commissioners
often invoke the statute as they fire up their bulldozers to
convert some forgotten cow trail across public land into a redneck
highway.

On June 29, U.S. District Court Judge Bruce
Jenkins put some figurative sand in those bulldozers' gas tanks by
tossing out a lawsuit by two southern Utah counties with RS-2477
claims in the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument. Most
significantly, the ruling says that the Bureau of Land Management,
alone, does not have the power to grant RS-2477 rights-of-way.
Rather, counties must prove their claims in court. That won't stop
the counties, but the cost of litigation may force them to be more
selective about road claims rather than making blanket RS-2477
claims that cover hundreds of roads.